Maddow in the "killing" fields!

Our own self-satisfied cant: Oh what the heck! Let's journey with Rachel Maddow to the "killing" fields, as inspired by recent events in Arkansas.

For ourselves, we're opposed to capital punishment. We can't recall ever making that decision. It seems that we have always been opposed to capital punishment.

Rachel Maddow seems to oppose capital punishment too. We say "seems" because, as part of her devolving post-journalistic style, she rarely develops information or arguments concerning the practice.

A few years ago, it became clear that Maddow opposes botched executions. But does she oppose executions in general, and if so, why? In place of presentations which would speak to such questions, Maddow simply tends to emote, as she did, one week ago, in a trademarked Maddovian manner.

Note the brave, and highly dramatic, exciting choice of words. This is standard practice for Maddow:

MADDOW (4/21/17): And thanks to you at home for joining us for the next hour.

So this was supposed to be the week when Arkansas held two back-to-back double-header executions. Arkansas has not killed any of its prisoners in more than twelve years, but they decided that that they would try to kill eight of them in a row, all in a rush, eight men, eight prisoners. They were going to kill eight of them, two per night, in four different doubleheader executions spread across a week and a half.

And the urgency for that was because one of the drugs they wanted to use for these executions is getting close to its sell-by date. It will, it will not be legal to use that drug to kill people after the drug expires at the end of this month.

And you know, from a bureaucratic perspective on the part of the state, that must make some sort of sense on paper, right? You know, "Oh, hey, got to hurry, we can't use this stuff to kill anyone after April. So let's kill everyone in April then. Let's kill them all. Now."

From the perspective of one of the people who's going to be killed though, you could see how that might seem like a fairly random factor deciding whether you are going to live or die, right? If the state didn't have this expiration date thing going on in that one drug that they didn't notice before, there'd be no chance that all of these guys would be on deck to be killed all at once. But that's the reason they're trying to kill 'em all right now.

Stephen Breyer is a moderate liberal justice on the Supreme Court, but he has decided to make a real hollering legacy out of his time on the Court by dissenting and dissenting and dissenting again when it comes to the vagaries and the strangeness and the bias in our nation's system of killing men and women who are prisoners.

So that's where we were as of last night. Arkansas wanted to kill eight men over the course of ten days. They wanted to have already killed four of them by this time tonight. But over the course of this week, three of their four planned killings got blocked by the courts.

And then, last night, as the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on the fate of the fourth man, at the very last minute last night, a few landmarks were reached.

Number one, the new justice, Neil Gorsuch, voted to kill his first man. He voted to kill, and it was a deciding vote, and that was his first significant vote on the United States Supreme Court.

Number two, Justice Stephen Breyer dissented again, short, sharp and to the point. It was less than two pages. It's pretty remarkable stuff, very straightforward, not particularly legalistic argument. He just puts it out there.

[...]

But Justice Breyer's opinion was a dissent. His side lost. The Neil Gorsuch side won, and Arkansas went ahead with one of the four killings they wanted to accomplish this week. The death warrants to kill Ledell Lee expired at midnight Central time. Less than an hour before that warrant expired, the United States Supreme Court voted five to four to let them kill him.

By 11:26 Central time, the Supreme Court decision had been conveyed to Arkansas and announced to the people who are at the prison. Eighteen minutes later, they started injecting Ledell Lee at 11:44. And then by 11:56, they said he was dead.

So that's important, that timing there just made it. The warrant that made it legal to kill him expired four minutes after they said he died.

Now Arkansas still wants to kill all the other prisoners that it can next week, before the expiration date on one of their drugs makes the rest of those executions illegal too. So they're hurrying.

And one of one of the things we'll be watching in the news this weekend is the continuing legal wrangling to see how many more of these guys they're going to be able to kill.

Maddow's work gets worse and worse all the time. (Did you see her flip, this Tuesday night, on that "Flynn was on the Turkish government payroll" matter?) Plainly, we liberals aren't able to discern this fact, and our career liberal pundits are never going to tell us. Dearest darlings, use your heads! It simply isn't done!

Watching her show, we liberals get ourselves Hannityized. Her devolving work is making it clear:

In the end, We simply aren't much sharper than They are. This helps explain how we've ended up with Donald J. Trump where he is.

Question for the fourth graders: Children, please address these questions:

Does the Supreme Court "vote to kill people?" Or does the Court vote on the constitutionality and legality of some such decision?

Maddow, like the partisans at the New York Times, used the term "rush". As I recall, most of these murderers were convicted around 15 to 20 years ago. A more accurate term might be "procrastinate" or "delay".

Yes, 8:29, in a world of infinite resources. But, resources are limited. The money spent keeping murderers alive and to continue litigating is money not available for health care, education, housing, food, environmental cleanup, etc. IMHO more lives would be saved if the money were spent on those types of things, rather than in the unlikely hope that a conviction might be overturned by some scientific discovery about to be made or just recently made.

I remember a good number of Illinois state deathrow inmates were exonerated in recent years by modern, irrefutable forensic evidence. If it comes down to strictly a matter of "resources" as to executing inmates, then capital punishment, the state taking life, just doesn't pass ethical muster.

Maddow gave a weird performance a year or more ago when another state (maybe OK) was looking for another execution method. They started to look at nitrogen, which would be an amazingly humane way to go...Typically with euphoria, as in the "raptures of the deep" as divers know it.

But Maddow freaked out, never mentioning that fact, and continued with her shtick that the inhumane monsters were off on some cruel new and twisted path.

It's fine to have an opinion, but Maddow is not open and honest in advancing her personal beliefs.

Well, I guess Bob couldn't report on the Flynn case, were Maddow would seem to have The White House dead to rights on some very, very bad behavior. And you kill someone when you execute them. Is this something Bob really finds outrageous?

MSNBC is talking about offering Hugh Hewitt a show. In the meantime, Brett Stephens first column is just as bad as everyone expected. With Trump in office, the media are remaking themselves in his image.

Meanwhile:Vice President Pence tore into the media on Saturday, calling journalists "willing allies" of left-wing activists and politicians.

Mike Pence should have to explain why he thinks the media, which is owned by corporations, are allying with left-wing activists, who Pence thinks are Marxists and socialists who hate capitalism.I don't think Pence can explain it, because Mike Pence is a lying sack of shit trying to play to the rubes who believe anything a Conservative says.